Smithe looked him over with active bemusement. The Englishman seemed incapable of judging when Switters was speaking earnestly and when he was merely being flippant. (The truth of the matter was, Switters could not always judge that, himself.)
In no way, however, did Smithe’s confusion lessen his gratitude. He thanked Switters over and over for interceding on his behalf. Then, abruptly he stubbed out his cigarette on a blackened post and said, “It’s barely noon. If we set out at once, I daresay we could reach Boquichicos by nightfall. What do you say, old boy? Shall we get cracking? Brisk march will do wonders for your condition. You can impart further detail over dinner at the hotel. My treat. Dinner.”
“The haute cuisine of Boquichicos is a lovely prospect,” said Switters, but he made no move to extricate himself from the hammock. Rather, he lay there looking troubled. He plowed his fingers through his badly tangled curls. He ran his tongue over his palate, tasting the bitter film left by parrot goulash and yopo vomit. He had to admit that he could do with a bit of bodily maintenance. “I can’t . . . uh . . . End of Time said. . . . There’s this. . . . Listen, I’ve been thinking that I might ask the Nacanaca studs to carry me back. In the hammock. Like a hunting trophy. A roll-up. Sedan chair sort of thing.”
“Really, Switters! How imperial.” Smithe laughed, but he, too, suddenly looked troubled, as if he had a premonition that things were about to go bad in a dramatic manner. “Are you that short on stamina?”
“No, but . . .”
“Then buck up, old boy. Show us some of the heralded Yankee spunk.”
Switters propped himself up on one elbow but stirred no further. The hammock swung gently, to and fro. “This is absolutely silly, I’m aware of that, but . . .”
“Do go on.”
“I’m under, I guess, a kind of taboo.”
“Whatever do you mean?”
Switters sighed, and for a second he looked less anxious than sheepish. “Well, End of Time told me, right before he left, that I had to pay a price for having been shown the secrets of the cosmos. At first I thought he wanted money, like almost everybody else on this pathological planet, and I objected because I’ve got barely enough cash to pay my hotel bill and my river crew, and am counting on Mr. Plastic to take care of me back in Lima. But that wasn’t the sort of price he had in mind.”
“No?”
“No. He said that henceforth I must never allow my feet to touch the ground. I can stand on top of things, as I understood it, but I can’t stand on the floor or the earth. And if I ever do, if my feet touch the ground, I will instantly fall over dead.”
“The bleeding bugger.”
“Yeah. So what do you make of it? He’s playing with my head, right? I mean, it’s silly, ridiculous.”
“Oh, without question. Quite silly. Load of bosh.”
“I was hoping you’d concur. As an experienced anthropologist, you must have come across this kind of thing before. I know, for example, that West Africa is crawling with curses and taboos—but there’re also a lot of credible witnesses who swear that they’re real, they’ve seen them work. That’s why I was inclined to err on the side of caution, to be perfectly honest.” He cloned the sheepish smile.
“Righto,” said Smithe. He paused, as if pondering. “Fascinating, though. There’s a quite similar prohibition in Irish folklore. Should a mortal ever stumble upon a fairy hill and be allowed to fraternize with the fairies, watch their dances and so forth, then the chap is warned that his feet may never thereafter touch the earth, under penalty of death. Evans-Wentz wrote of this, as I recall. Stories abound of pixilated Irishmen who, out of fear, spent the remainder of their lives on horseback.”
“Superstition, of course?”
“Of course. The Irish.”
“Flapdoodle?”
“Don’t rag me. I’ve been told more than once that my manner of speech is a trifle old-fashioned. Blame it on my school. Eleanor does. But you’re quite right. Flapdoodle. As a matter of fact, End of Time, that scalawag, placed a comparable taboo on me.”
“No kidding?” For the first time in that conversation, Switters looked relieved. “The same taboo as my own?”
“Uh, no, not precisely, though promising identical consequences.”
“And you’re alive and ambulating. That bodes well for me.” When Smithe didn’t respond, Switters asked, “Doesn’t it?”
“Um.”
“Doesn’t it?”
“Oh, it should. It should. Yes.”
For reasons not entirely clear, Switters felt his heart sinking. He made an effort to nail Potney with his infamous glare. “Let’s have it, pal.”
“Sorry?”
“Your taboo, goddamn it! Let’s have it.”
Smithe’s wan smile was even more sheepish than Switters’s own. “A bit off the bean, I’m afraid.” He shuffled his flip-flops.
“Never mind the fucking bean!” Although still basically on his back, he managed to look menacing.
“If you must know,” said Smithe, clearing his throat, “and there’s little reason why you shouldn’t, End of Time warned me that as penalty for having journeyed with him to so-called secret places, I would face instant death—in much the mode you, yourself, described—were I ever to touch another man’s penis.”
Switters didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. He lay there, mute, listening as the creak of the hammock twine blended with the rustling of jungle foliage on all sides of them.
“Rubbish, obviously,” said Smithe, trying to sound blasé. “One must contend with a sometimes maddening lack of rational—”
“You’ve tested it?” Switters interrupted.
“When dealing with the primitive mind—”
“So, you’ve tested it?”
“Why, no, no,” Smithe almost sputtered. “Naturally, I haven’t actually put it to the test. That’s silly.”
“But you’re supposed to be a scientist. Were you afraid to test it?”
“Fear has had nothing to do with it. I might have tested it, probably would have, but, well, you know, the nature of the thing involved.”
“You mean the penis thing?”
“Of course, I do. I jolly well do mean that. What do you take me for? I’m a married man. Christ!”
“Easy, big fellow. No inference intended. But you’ll agree, will you not, that scientists must occasionally undertake experiments they find personally distasteful? You speak of rationality, yet how can you for a damn second rationally contend that this taboo is rubbish when you haven’t subjected it to experiment?”
Smithe snorted.
“You’ve got to test it, pal. For your sake as well as my own—and I can’t deny I have a stake in this. In the outcome, I mean.”
“You’re not suggesting? . . . Surely.”
“Hey, it’s not my cup of tee-hee, either. I’m as straight as you are. Probably straighter. From what I hear, your lads in the fancy schools of Merry Olde can get pretty chummy with one another when the lights are low.”
“Of all the biased—”
“Okay, forget I said that. It’s no big deal one way or the other. What’s the big deal? Women don’t have this problem. They’re more evolved.” He paused. “R. Potney Smithe. What’s the R for?”
“I fail to see . . .”
“What’s the R for?”
“Reginald.”
“Reginald. Okay. You very easily could have gone by Reggie. Couldn’t you have? Reggie Smithe. A moniker mundane by any standard. But, no, you elected to be called Potney. A fairly brave choice there, pal. I admire you for it. I’m serious. I mean it. Says something about your character. And here you are in this jungle juju joint when you could have been snapping petits fours with the vicar of Kidderminster or some damn such. You’ve got guts.” (Switters spoke in the abstract, of course, since the image of guts as an actual physical mass was seldom permitted to invade his consciousness.)
“I fail to see . . .”
“Come on, Pot. Let’s get it
over with.”
Smithe glanced around him, as if looking for support, but the long, narrow, platformed room was empty except for the two of them.
“Just a touch. One brief touch, that’s it. You needn’t grab hold of anything. I’d object if you did. Strenuously.”
Smithe’s hide, at all times richly hued, looked now as if it had been rolled in paprika. He seemed on the verge of spontaneous combustion. “Down there,” he said, nodding his teddy bear head in the direction of the firepit and the Nacanaca. “They could easily notice. . . .”
“Not if you hurry. And so what if they did? Do you honestly believe anybody in this part of the world would be scandalized? We’re in South America!”
With that, Switters unzipped the fly of his bedraggled linen trousers. The scratchy snickersnee swoosh produced by the swift separation of metal teeth was a sound more ominous to both men than any hiss or shriek or howl that might emanate from the unknown forest. Briefly, each of them froze, as if paralyzed by stun rays from an advanced technology.
Then, Smithe turned toward the hammock, a look of grim determination on his face. “Bloody good, then,” he said. Childishly awkward in his flip-flops and quasimilitaristic tan tropical togs, he began to advance. “You’re right. Let’s be done with it.”
“Uh,” said Switters, hurriedly, “uh, now if you have any reason to suppose there’s something to this taboo, that it might actually—”
“No, no.” Smithe paused. “Oh, if a bloke were to accept such superstitious nonsense on faith, it’s quite possible that he would be psychologically susceptible to whatever end the perpetrator of the malediction might have planted in his unsophisticated mind. But no civilized, sensible—”
“Okay, but what if you secretly believe in it, believe in it subconsciously and don’t know that you believe?”
Smithe seemed not to hear. He was advancing again. Thus, wishing to avoid any clumsy, embarrassing, last-minute fumbling, Switters freed his penis from its confinement within the folds of cheerfully patterned boxer shorts and pulled it out into the open. Almost instantly, it commenced, of its own volition, to crane its neck and bob its head about, as if sniffing the air, sensing that something fun—something uplifting, even—might be in the offing. Oh, Christ Almighty, no! This can’t be happening! In a panicky effort to quell the unwanted alertness, the independent impetus toward active participation, Switters strained to think of the most repulsive, unsexy things he could mentally conjure. He thought of an overflowing cat box and buckets of offal, thought of gift shoppes, TV game shows, and the time George Bush had addressed the employees at Langley. Just as he squeezed his eyes shut, the better to picture these anti-aphrodisiacs, R. Potney Smithe extended a forefinger and jabbed Switters’s half-erect member the way a shy but righteously purposeful Jehovah’s Witness might press an agnostic’s doorbell. Switters felt an electric jolt, although later he conceded that he might only have imagined it.
Smithe took a couple of steps backward. All of the ruddiness drained from his features, and he commenced to pull and pick at his shirtfront, as if involved in floccillation. Then he swayed. Pivoted to the right. And toppled onto the scorched and pitted floor.
For quite a while—it may have been as long as five minutes—Switters swung quietly in the hammock, staring at the heap on the floor, searching for signs of life; signs, more precisely, that Smithe was, as the Brit himself would have put it, ragging him, putting him on, pushing to an extreme his occasional dry fondness for jest.
At that point a figure ascended the wobbly ladder, and Fer-de-lance climbed onto the platform. The aspiring witchman glided noiselessly across the room, like one of the creatures for whom he seemed to have such affinity, and looking, in snakeskin cape and Ray-Ban sunglasses, like a Hollywood Boulevard vampire. He knelt beside Smithe’s form.
“Muy muerto,” Fer-de-lance whispered. “Muy muerto.” He glanced over his shoulder at Switters, who was struggling to inconspicuously fasten his fly. “This mister is very, very dead,” said he.
part 2
Every taboo is holy.
—Eskimo saying
Except for one shortish but memorable visit to Sacramento, another to Langley, Virginia, Switters spent the next six months in Seattle. It was the strangest period of his life.
It was stranger than his cloak-and-dagger days in and around Kuwait, stranger than his strangest nights of pleasure in the brothels of Southeast Asia, stranger than the annual Bloomsday literary banquets at the C.R.A.F.T. Club of Bangkok (though of these he couldn’t remember a fucking thing); stranger, even, than nine hours of modern poetry at the University of California, Berkeley.
Well and good, but surely, one must ask, was there nothing about that half year, passed largely idle, in Seattle that was not positively humdrum when compared to the calamitous craziness he’d recently undergone in South America or the beatific bumfuzzlements he was soon to undergo in Syria? Yes, as far as Switters was concerned, the Seattle sojourn would always be the stranger of the experiences or, at least, the period when his equanimity was most rigorously challenged. And he was, after all, the final authority on that sojourn, although others were unquestionably involved. These included Maestra, Suzy, and Bad Bobby Case, as well as an assistant deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency called Mayflower Cabot Fitzgerald; and, indirectly, from afar, the Kandakandero Indian known, perhaps erroneously, as End of Time. (Fer-de-lance had concluded that the shaman’s name could be more accurately translated to mean End of Future, or more explicitly yet, Today Is Tomorrow. Accent on the verb. Today Is Tomorrow.)
The oddness of those months back in the U.S. could be attributed not merely to the major problems implicit in adjusting to life in a wheelchair but also to his efforts to come to terms with the usher—the Ka’dak witchman or Switters, himself—who had assigned him to that mobile yet restrictive seat. Compounding those predicaments, naturally, were the reactions of others, mainly but not exclusively, the friends, relatives, and employers listed above.
During his first week back, he’d had to contend with no one but Maestra. To her, he’d provided only the most ambiguous explanation of his sudden confinement to a wheelchair, claiming that his disability was related to activities that he was not at liberty to discuss; the same activities, he said, that unfortunately had destroyed her camcorder along with its heartwarming record of Sailor Boy’s flight to freedom.
“Right,” said Maestra sarcastically, rolling, behind the huge circular lenses of her spectacles, a pair of bleary, beady eyes. “The old ‘for reasons of national security’ alibi. Heh! I’m a loyal American of long standing, but that doesn’t mean I’m so flag-addled I can’t recognize our favorite euphemism for ‘governmental hanky-panky swept under the rug.’ Anyway,” she continued, “there’s a place where men disabled in the line of duty can go to convalesce. It’s called Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. If you prefer to recuperate at Chez Maestra instead, you’d better be prepared to spill some beans.”
Switters put her off. “In a few days,” he promised. “I’ll be able to talk about it in a few days.” Thereafter, every time she attempted to bring up the subject or even, in passing, shot him an imploring glance, he’d wink, grin, and proclaim, “Women love these fierce invalids home from hot climates.”
Alas, Maestra was not the type to be charmed more than once or twice by a line from Rimbaud memorized in a long-ago poetry class, no matter how attractively delivered. Faced with her increasing impatience and growing suspicions—”I have to say, buddy boy, you look pretty healthy to me; that camcorder cost twelve hundred bucks, I’m privy to your wanting to milk Suzy’s aphid, and you neglected to bring me a bracelet”—Switters, already in a confounded state and not knowing what else to do, sent for Bobby Case.
“Switters! What the hell? What have you gone and done to yourself?”
The e-message Bobby received in Alaska had stated only that his friend needed urgently to see him and supplied a Seattle address. Having a coup
le of days off, Case hitched a ride aboard a military transport plane out of Fairbanks bound for McChord Air Force Base near Tacoma. Within twenty-four hours after reading his e-mail, he arrived, noisily, at Maestra’s door on a rented motorcycle.
“Bobby! Wow! Welcome. That was fast.”
“Naw, man. That was slower than snail snot. Must be losing my edge. But you?! What the hell? Fall down the stairs in a whorehouse?”
Switters checked Bobby’s black leather jacket for signs of moisture. “It’s quit drizzling, hasn’t it? Let’s go out on the side deck where we can talk privately—although even the deck could be bugged.”
“Company or offshore bug?”
“Maestra bug.”
“Really? Your granny doesn’t look like no ear artist, although she does appear to have a burr in her britches.”
“She rude to you when she let you in?”
“Nice as pie. I even got the impression she was kinda flirting with me.”
“That’s Maestra. An Aphrodite type right down to the finish line.”
“She took to me. It’s you she seems to have a problem with.”
“Well, she’ll have to stand in line with the rest. Come on. Follow me.”
“I’m right behind you, son. But what did she mean when she called you Mr. Worker Ant?”
“Never mind that.” He all but blushed. “It’s a pet name. Family thing.”
“Oh. Like when my uncles and aunts used to call me ‘little asshole.’ “
Demonstrating his growing expertise with the chair, Switters wheeled down the dim foyer, past the living room—pausing briefly to ascertain that the Matisse was still there—and through a formal dining room permanently lacquered with the unsophisticated fumes from takeout food. From the dining room, French doors led out onto a spacious deck with a sweeping view of the cold and busy sound named for Peter Puget. Next to a potted evergreen there was a Styrofoam chest, which he circled three times rapidly before coming to a halt beside it, facing the water.